Upsetting Day: Grosse Pointe (Patreon)
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After ten seasons working on Beverly Hills 90210, pretty much everyone hated it except for Ian Ziering. That man knew what he had. You can't blame most of the non-Ian Ziering cast for hating the show because they were making 32 episodes of hour-long television a year for the majority of those ten seasons. This meant the cast worked thirteen-hour days, five days a week, year after year. That much straight-to-camera smoldering would drive any teen heartthrob to madness.
The Person who hated Beverly Hills 90210 more than anyone wasn't a cast member, though; it was the creator of the show, Darren Star. He was 28-years-old when Beverly Hills 90210 was greenlit. A few seasons in, he successfully spun off Melrose Place, and in 1998, while Beverly Hills 90210 was still going in its eighth season, he became a household name by creating Sex And The City. With that many successes under his belt, he could make any TV show that he wanted. But what he wanted was to roast his first show and all of the people who worked on it, except for Ian Ziering, who he didn't even notice enough to roast, which is the biggest roast of all.
Grosse Pointe was a satire of the behind-the-scenes drama on a popular teen show called Grosse Pointe because it's set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, instead of Beverly Hills. Yes, it could have been set anywhere, and this was three years after the movie Grosse Pointe Blank came out. The title is the first of many weird decisions made on this show.
I can't stress enough that this was a man at the height of his fame coming back to his old stomping grounds to stomp on the people who drove him nuts when he was first starting out. Aaron Spelling reportedly cussed him out over his satire of Tori Spelling and forced him to change the character before the show aired, or he would sue. Darren Star's main criticism of Tori Spelling was that despite her success, she was extremely insecure so that tabloid story really didn't help the public perception that Darren Star had bodied her on network cable.
Apparently, the character based on Tori Spelling, Marcy Sternfeld, originally had the backstory of only being hired on the show because her father was a producer. Aaron Spelling didn't want people thinking that he only hired Tori because she was his daughter, so he had the storyline cut. Unfortunately, everyone could see Tori act on Beverly Hills 90210, so we all know that storyline was spitting hard truths. That was what Grosse Pointe was all about. Imagine going back to the Burger King you worked at as a teenager and getting to tell everyone who worked there exactly what was wrong with them. Darren has lived the dream.
At least one of the star's of Beverly Hills 90210 was cool with his former boss making fun of him. Jason Priestley directed one episode of the show and had a small cameo as himself in a sex addiction recovery group. However, I don't think it's that hard to get Jason Priestley to show up on your TV show. Also, Jason Preistley's character came off pretty good compared to his co-stars. Daren Star's take on Priestley was that he was a horny little guy who would rather smoke weed and surf than work. We're all Jason Priestley.
The two actors who got the worst portrayals were Luke Perry and Shannon Doherty. The Shannon Doherty character is an absolute monster, and Darren Star does everything he can to scream, "This is Shannon Doherty!" He even parodied her extremely short marriage to Ashley Hamilton, the son of a much more famous actor, by having her analog, Hunter Fallow, marry Dweezil Zappa. The choice of guest stars was another wild thing about this show.
One of the most memorable storylines for Hunter is when she goes after a movie role portraying Monica Lewinsky and has to gain weight which causes her to become a noticeably nicer person. "All this time, she wasn't a bitch, she was just hungry!" the Darren Star character exclaims. That kind of commentary on what the young actresses had to go through to meet audience expectations actually kind of ruled for 2000 when tabloids were calling Britney Spears chubby. He found a way to call Shannon Doherty a bitch and point out the constant struggle of dieting for teen stars which is, I think, what art is all about? That and robot fights, obviously.
Darren Star only has nice things to say about Luke Perry today, but at some point in the past, Luke Perry crossed that man. He did something truly terrible like give him the idea for Emily In Paris. His analogue is named Quenten Barbary King, and his three major character traits are being a creep, obsessing over his receding hairline and the wigs he uses to cover it, and having an annoying pet pig named Brando. This isn't true because, in real life, Luke Perry didn't just have one pet pig; he had several.
I know I said I don't know what Luke Perry did to Darren Star, but now that I think about it, they were probably pig-related crimes. If he had brought a pig to a TV set even once, I could see why he would have gotten the Quenten Barbary King treatment. One of his storylines included hitting an old woman with his car and then taking credit for rescuing her from a hit and run driver. He also was forced to join sex obsessives anonymous and had a restraining order taken out against him by a co-star so she wouldn't have to do scenes with him anymore. Hunter Fallow gets some sympathy and humanization later in the series, but Quenten never does. I guess Shannon Doherty never bought a pig to set.
The point-of-view character on Grosse Pointe is Courtney Scott, a former fan of the show, starting her first day as a new character in the pilot. Darren Star has a lot more to say about what the show does to Courtney than how Courtney tortures the poor producers of the show behind the scenes. She's a perfectly nice girl, but what everyone likes about her is that she's smoking hot, so the producers keep finding new and terrible excuses for her to take her clothes off until they literally make her character a teen escort, which is exactly what Beverly Hills 90210 did to Tiffani Thiessen's character.
There are also lots of storylines where the other actresses are jealous of Courtney's new character's popularity and try to sabotage her in various ways. You could have made the argument that Darren Star was parodying how everyone imagined what the set of 90210 was like because of tabloid headlines, ACTRESS MARRIES B-LIST ACTOR OFFSPRING AFTER TWO WEEKS OF DATING, JASON PRIESTLEY ACTUALLY PRETTY HORNY, LUKE PERRY'S WIG WRANGLER IS BAT BOY, etc. Except that Tiffani Theissen never said anything about having issues with the other actresses in the cast until over a decade later, so Darren Star was spilling at least a little tea.
There is a character based on Darren Star, and he isn't a Mary Sue by any means. He's constantly stress-eating and obsessing over network notes, which aligns with what Star said about his time on the show. He got pushed around by the network a lot because of his age and felt like everyone around him was having a lot of fun while he was always stressed. Gee, I wonder if he ever found a way to translate all of his frustration during that time into art!
Despite good reviews, Grosse Pointe only aired for one season. My guess is that the target audience for the show was basically the same audience for Beverly Hills 90210, and they felt like they were also being made fun of for falling for the act while Darren Star was poking fun at the people from the posters on their walls. Also, some powerful people behind the scenes may have been rooting for it to fail for unknown reasons.
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